"Hate the festival." His voice is rough, low, pitched for me even with the crowd leaning in. "Whole town's watching me make an ass of myself. Figured that was the point. You put your truth on the table in my workshop where it was safe and quiet. Least I can do is put mine out here where it costs me something."
"Kieran."
"Let me get through it." A breath, his hands flexing at his sides. "A woman I trusted once turned my own control into a weapon and left me sure I couldn't be trusted with anyone soft again. So when you handed me the real thing, I called it a lie, because a lie I knew how to survive. You weren't her. You were never her. I made you into her so I'd have an excuse to push first." His jaw works. "I had six days left with you and I set them on fire so they couldn't burn me. Dumbest thing I've ever built, and I build for a living."
"I was leaving," I say, because he gave me his, and he gets mine. "I do that. I pour my whole self into someone, then I disappear behind them until there's nothing of me left. I came up here to find out what I want when nobody's asking me for anything, and I found you, and I almost handed you the same empty bowl I hand everyone." I touch the sign, the letters he carved before he knew if I'd stay. "I'm not doing that anymore. I'm signing this lease for me. Whatever you decide."
"Sign it." He steps closer, gravel under every word. "Sign it, and build your kitchen, and live your whole loud life on this street. I'm not asking you to make me your everything. I'm asking to be one of your things. The one who carries the heavy stuff and feeds the dog and holds you down when you want to be held down." His hand comes up, careful, thumb at my jaw. "Stay because you want the town. Keep me because you want me. Two separate yeses. I'll take whatever you give."
I sign the lease against his chest because my hands won't work otherwise.
Then I kiss him in the middle of the closed street while the whole town pretends not to cheer.
He getsme back to the cabin before either of us can speak again. The door barely shuts before he's got me against it, mouth on my throat, hands shoving my dress up my thighs.
"Two days," he growls. "Two days I thought I lost you."
"You didn't. I'm right here."
He drops to his knees on the floor of the half packed cabin and pushes my underwear aside, and his mouth is on me before I can breathe, tongue working my clit, two fingers curling deep until my knees buckle and I fist his hair to stay standing. He builds it fast and rough, no patience left in him tonight, and when I come against his mouth he doesn't ease me down. He stands, spins me to face the door, and bends me forward by the back of the neck.
"Hold on."
He's inside me in one stroke, both hands gripping my hips, and the angle has me crying out against the wood. Every thrust is deep and claiming. His chest covers my back, his mouth at my ear telling me whose I am, how good I take him, how he's never letting another summer talk him out of this. One hand slides around to my clit and works me in time with his cock, and I shatter a second time around him, clenching so hard he loses his rhythm and follows me down, buried to the hilt, my name breaking out of him rough.
We end up on the floor in a tangle of moving boxes, both of us laughing, his arm heavy over me, my back to his chest where it's been all along.
"Color," he says into my hair, out of habit, and I feel him grin.
"Green forever. Frame it." I lace my fingers through his over my heart. "Your dog's gonna be insufferable about me coming back."
"He's already at the bottom of the stairs waiting."
I turn in his arms. The scary Shaw brother who walked through a whole festival to put his heart on Main Street is looking at me, soft around the eyes, wrecked and certain.
"Sit," I tell him, and pat the floor beside me.
He huffs a laugh, the first easy one I've heard from him, and pulls me into his lap instead.
"Make me," he says.
So I do.
EPILOGUE
KIERAN
SIX MONTHS LATER
The sign I carved hangs over the door of the busiest room in Crimson Hollow, and I built every table under it.
Opening night. Snow coming down soft on Birch Street, string lights blurred through the steamed front windows, and inside, every seat in Bianca's restaurant is full. The walnut sign over the door catches the light. Below it, her menu, her abuela's recipes folded into whatever the mountain grows, half the town packed in to eat food they've been hearing about for six months.
She's behind the pass in her whites, hair tied back, calling tickets, and watching her run a kitchen is doing something to my chest I've stopped fighting.
Bishop slides onto the stool beside me at the little bar she let me build along the back wall.
"Town's full of people who used to cross the street when they saw you coming," he says. "Now they're eating short rib forty feet from you and nobody's scared."
